Robert Smalls

Robert Smalls was born into slavery on the fifth of April 1839, in a cabin behind the house of Henry McKee at 511 Prince Street in Beaufort, South Carolina. His mother, Lydia Polite, was enslaved by the McKee family. As a young man he was hired out in Charleston, working his way from longshoreman and rigger to wheelsman aboard the harbor steamers, gaining an intimate knowledge of the waters and defenses of Charleston that would one day set him free.

When the Civil War came, the steamer Planter was pressed into Confederate service as an armed transport, and Smalls served as its enslaved wheelsman. Before dawn on the thirteenth of May 1862, while the vessel's white officers were ashore, Smalls and a small crew of fellow freedom-seekers fired the boilers, slipped from the wharf, and gathered their waiting families aboard. Wearing the captain's coat and straw hat, he sounded the correct signals past five Confederate forts and delivered the ship to the Union blockade, winning liberty for himself, his crew, and their kin.

Now a celebrated pilot, Smalls served the Union through some seventeen engagements and rose to command the Planter himself. After emancipation he purchased the very house in which he had been enslaved. He helped found South Carolina's Republican Party, served in the state House and Senate, and was elected five times to the United States Congress between 1875 and 1887, championing public education and the rights of the newly freed.

He spent his last years in Beaufort as customs collector for the port, and died there on the twenty-third of February 1915. From bondage to the helm of a warship to the halls of Congress, Robert Smalls steered his own course and lit the way for a people. May his courage be forever honored.